Weeknote 30/2025
My out of office is activated and I am now on holiday 🏖️
I haven’t had a proper break yet this year, which is unusual as for the past couple of years I’ve intentionally taken three periods of three weeks off in April, August, and December. After all, there’s not much point in being in control of your calendar if you’re just going to continue acting like an employee. Right?
My reason, however, for spending pretty much seven months without a break isn’t a masochistic one. Although I was at my desk every day, I had very little work on for the first three months of the year. Taking a chunk of time off in April, when work started to come in, would have been a bit counter-productive.
But I’m ready for a break now, especially given all of the drama around my health. My symptoms are high heart rate under any cardiovascular stress, for which I’ve been prescribed Angitil and Atorvastatin. So far, tests have shown the problem isn’t related to my heart, lungs, thyroid, or iron levels. Next in the battery of tests is a 24-hour urine test to check for a possible pheochromocytoma. I should get my results back soon. The lack of a diagnosis is the reason we’ve rebooked our flights to Madeira (which we would have been taking tomorrow) to instead go to Barcelona next February half-term.
A note in passing: Atorvastatin is, as its name suggests, a statin. Lots of people are on these to lower cholesterol and, from what I can gather, a side effect of them inhibiting cholesterol production is that they also lower one’s production of CoQ10. This isn’t so awesome, as it’s important for a range of factors, mainly relating to energy levels. I’ve ordered some CoQ10 supplements and will report back on results.
This week, I’ve mostly been working with Laura on completing a technical report and recommendations which finishes off first statement of work for Amnesty International UK. In other words, we’re make a recommendation around their new community platform. The next statement of work is about configuring it and getting the processes and workflows in place. As ever with community work, the platform makes a difference, but not so much as what you do with it.
Separately to the co-op, it looks like Aaron and I have have been successful in winning some work in a field outside of my usual learning, technology, and community comfort zone. It’s with an organisation that deals with “evidence-based interventions in livestock,” most notably around disease prevention in Africa and South Asia. We’re helping them with some theory of change work in the first instance, as they plan their 10-year strategy.
Other than that, I’ve been starting to plan a series of workshops on digital badges / Verifiable Credentials for Skills Development Scotland, finishing off the DCC Summit report, and creating a skeleton slide deck ready for presenting the AI Literacies work we did for the Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures, hosted by the BBC.
On Wednesday, Ben, my 18 year-old son, picked up his Players’ Player of the Year award from his basketball team. He’d been on holiday with friends when the ceremony took place and discovered that the only person not to have voted for him, was himself! A unanimous decision is a pretty awesome confidence-booster. He’s won an individual trophy like that every season since he was nine years old — Manager’s Player, Players’ Player, Most Man of the Matches, the lot. His trophy shelf is quite different to mine at his age, which mostly showed that I turned up every week 😅
As I mentioned last week, my daughter’s successful football team folded, so she’s been trialling for a range of teams. Although nothing is finalised yet, she could end up playing for a team even better than the one that she has been. It might mean a lot of travel, though. That means that we might have to up the number of annual miles we pay the leasing company for our new Polestar 2 arriving at the end of August…
Next week, we head off to Devon. We’ll spend some time with Hannah’s family, visit a few beaches, and play some table tennis at the nice Airbnb we’ve booked. During the first pandemic lockdown we bought a table tennis net to go across our dining table, which is approximately the correct size. Coupled with family holidays where we try to ensure access to table tennis, we’re all pretty good.
The week after, I’m not sure. I’d like to get some proper reading done, so I’ve started reading the ~1,000 pages of Don Quixote. It’s a book I’ve always wanted to read but have never got around to doing so before now.
Photo taken by me on a morning walk this week.